Punctum Saliens

I’ve touched on this idea in several other posts but while browsing my usual blogs I ran across several talking about the Trinity. The other day, I started outlining my own Trinity post but what I saw today led me in a slightly different direction.

On Faith and Theology, Kim Fabricius has a post called Ten propositions on the Trinity. Propositions 2-4 read as follows:

2. The Trinity is not an academic doctrine thought up by clever scholars, rather it grew out of the Christian experience of worship, i.e. it expressed the early church’s pattern of prayer to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.

3. The driving force of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was Christological and soteriological, i.e. it served to articulate the Christian experience of salvation in Christ. The first Christians already knew God; through Jesus they came to know God as Jesus’ Father and Jesus as God’s Son; while in the Spirit Jesus continued to be present to them, forming a family of prayer to the Father and building a community of witness to Christ.

4. The church’s thinking was this: As God discloses himself in worship and salvation, so God must be in Godself. In the technical language of (Karl) Rahner’s Rule: the “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity, and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity. What you see is what you get, and what you get is what there is.

So, according to props 2 and 3, the Trinity “grew out of” and “served to articulate” an experience. But “experience” is very subjective. We can — and do in everyday life — experience things as “other than” what they are.

You experience the chair you are sitting on as a solid surface but at the atomic level there is far more empty space than occupied space.

You experience a firetruck as “red” but it appears red because that is the wavelength of light (i.e. color) that the paint on the firetruck rejects — it absorbs the other colors. So, is it really red or is it really not red or “other than” red.

We all experience time as other than the passing of regular intervals. “I spent the longest winter of my life in Chicago one weekend.” “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

I am fortunate enough to have seen Michelangelo’s The David in Florence. This is, in it’s physical essence, a chunk of stone. It’s been handled by a true genius but in it’s being it is a chunk of stone. But I experienced awe when I saw it. I did not perceive this piece of stone as just stone but as a presence.

So, is the chair “really” solid as I experience it? Is the firetruck “really” red as I experience it? Is The David “really” more than a chunk of stone as I experience it? Can we say that God “really” is a Trinity because that’s how we experience God?

Proposition 4 then claims that how God is disclosed to us through our experience must be God. This is the same God who could only flash his backside to Moses without killing him. We can know this God with certainty?

I find it simply fascinating that in one breath (some) Christians will talk about their perfect, all powerful, all knowing, all present God who is powerful enough to create the world by merely speaking and who works in such mysterious ways that we cannot know them and who is outside time and yada yada yada and yet in the very next breath say with utter conviction, “but that notion of God is 100% wrong”. In other words, “we can’t know everything that God is but we do know everything that God is not“.

Since (some) Christians experience God as the Trinity then God must be the Trinity and even though they don’t really know God they do know that if you don’t experience God as the Trinity then you are not really experiencing God and are a heretic. Bruce makes some excellent points along this line in his post Is Belief in the Doctrine of the Trinity Essential?:

The question I have is “can someone believe a heretical doctrine and still be a Christian?” How much heresy until they fall away from the faith? Where is that line where a person goes from child of God to child of the devil? Is salvation by “correct doctrine” or is it by personal faith in Jesus Christ? What about the Christians of the first 4 centuries before this issue was settled? Are they to be considered Christians if they did not believe in the Trinity they had not been taught yet? Did the Apostles teach Trinitarianism during the first 100 years of the Church? If not, how can they be considered Christians if Trinitarianism is essential to the Christian faith?

I also question our selective appeal to Church history. The Church, almost universally, throughout history baptized people for the remission of sins. History clearly bears this out. Yet, Baptists reject this. Are they not heretics for refusing the witness of the historic Church? Why is one group heretical but not the other? Who decides? The Pope? The National Council of Churches? The National Association of Evangelicals? Every little pope that pastors a local, evangelical Church? Who decides and by what authority?

I think that any and all notions of God that are disclosed to us (regular people — true mystics aside, perhaps) must be “dumbed-down” approximations of God’s true being. The concept of the Trinity (among others) is, very purposefully, just beyond our comprehension. It is a mystery that we can embrace without being completely overwhelmed. It is God showing us his backside as he did with Moses. But it is also less than God’s true being. It is the veil hiding God’s true face.

God may very well have seven veils — the Trinity being one. God may choose to disclose his being in different forms at different times to different people. If we have seen but the one veil, who are we to say that another, different veil does not hide the same face?